, "With a thousand apologies, and the assurance that only
the extreme need of some one's doing something for poor Francis's
children would bring me to trouble you again,"--this was Miss Madigan's
vice. And she was as intemperate in yielding to it as only the viciously
good can be.

A rebuff, absolute silence, even the return of her letter unopened,
produced in her not the slightest diminution of faith in the power of
her pen. Invariably when she mailed a letter she was so struck by her
own summing up of the situation that she felt there could not be the
smallest doubt of a favorable response. He who read it must be
convinced. If he was not, why, there was but one thing to do--write to
him again. If not to him, to another. And the Madigans were a prolific
family, its members widely scattered and differentiated--an ideal
clientele for a ready letter-writer.

So Miss Madigan wrote. Her wardrobe was pillaged, her privacy violated,
yet she knew it not, or knew it only as one is aware of the buzzing of
gnats when he rides his hobby through a cloud of them.

But there came an interruption which she was compelled to heed.

"Anne, I say!"

Miss Madigan's busy pen paused. It seemed to her that there was unusual
irritation in her brother's irascible voice. Was it possible that he had
knocked before, or was there--

The door opened in answer to her call, and Madigan stalked in. At sight
of the open letter he held, Miss Madigan hastily covered the one she was
writing.

[Illustration:
"Stamping ... in a frenzy"]

"Perhaps," said her brother, suppressed rage vibrating in his voice, "it
may be a change for you to _read_ letters. Read that!" He threw the page
on the desk before her, banging his knuckles upon it in an excess of
fury.

She took up the letter, a pretty rosy pink dyeing her cheeks (she was
one of those old maids whose exquisitely delicate complexions retain a
babylike freshness) as her eyes met the expression:

Anne was always a sot where her pen was concerned. The
habit's growing on her; she can evidently no more
resist it than Miles could the bottle.

"It must be from Nora Madigan," she exclaimed, recognizing the touch.

"Yes, it is from Nora, and it incloses one of your own. There it is."

He threw down before the ready letter-writer a composition which had
cost her much labor, the thought of many days, upon which she had based
unnumbered hopes and built air-castles galore, none of